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The General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony decides that every town of 50 families should have an elementary school and every town of 100 should have a Latin school. The main was goal was to teach children to read the Bible and to learn the Calvinist Religion. -
Pennsylvania state constitution calls for free public education but only for poor children. The rich were expected to pay for their children's education.
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First public high school in the U.S., Boston, English opens. -
In most south states, people in slavery are not allowed to learn how to read. Many still become literate at the risk of their own lives. -
The percentage of people working in agriculture plummets as family farms are gobbled up by larger agricultural businesses and people are forced to look for work in towns and cities. During the 10 years from 1846 to 1856, 3.1 million immigrants arrive a number equal to one eighth of the entire U.S. population. Owners of industry needed a docile, obedient workforce and look to public schools to provide it.
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Congress makes it illegal for Native Americans to be taught in their native languages. Native children as young as four years old are taken from their parents and sent to Bureau of Indian Affairs off-reservation boarding schools, whose goal, as one BIA official put it, is to "kill the Indian to save the man." -
The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the state of Louisiana has the right to require "separate but equal" railroad cars for Blacks and whites. This decision means that the federal government officially recognizes segregation as legal. One result is that southern states pass laws requiring racial segregation in public schools. -
Whites regain political control of the South and lay the foundations of legal segregation. -
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The Supreme Court unanimously agrees that segregated schools are "inherently unequal" and must be abolished. However, even 54 years later schools are still segregated especially in the North. -
Students of Los Angeles County public schools and their families argued that the California school finance system, which relied heavily on local property tax, disadvantaged the students in districts with lower income. The California Supreme Court found the system in violation of the Equal Protection Clause because there was too great a disparity in the funding provided for various districts. -
A female middle-school student was unable to try out for her school’s football team, as the tryouts were restricted to boys only. She claimed that the school’s policy violated her Fourteenth Amendment equal protection rights. The district court ruled in the student’s favor, finding that the school offered no justifiable reason for preventing girls from trying out -
A student with learning disabilities switched from public school to private school after not getting his needs met. It was ordered that the public school district reimburse the student for all private school expenses, even though the student had not been receiving special education at the public school. Supreme Court ruled that the school could be forced to reimburse the student if FAPE had not been provided, regardless of whether the student had previously received special education.